Aristotle Men Quotations

Persuasion is achieved by the speaker's personal character when the speech is so spoken as to make us think him credible. We believe good men more fully and more readily than others: this is true generally whatever the question is, and absolutely true where exact certainty is impossible and opinions are divided.

Democracy is when the indigent, and not the men of property, are the rulers.

Excellence, then, is a state concerned with choice, lying in a mean, relative to us, this being determined by reason and in the way in which the man of practical wisdom would determine it.

It is clearly better that property should be private, but the use of it common; and the special business of the legislator is to create in men this benevolent disposition.

Men acquire a particular quality by constantly acting in a particular way.

Those who excel in virtue have the best right of all to rebel, but then they are of all men the least inclined to do so.

We praise a man who feels angry on the right grounds and against the right persons and also in the right manner at the right moment and for the right length of time.

Perfect friendship is the friendship of men who are good, and alike in excellence; for these wish well alike to each other qua good, and they are good in themselves.

The wise man does not expose himself needlessly to danger, since there are few things for which he cares sufficiently; but he is willing, in great crises, to give even his life - knowing that under certain conditions it is not worthwhile to live.

At his best, man is the noblest of all animals; separated from law and justice he is the worst.

Jealousy is both reasonable and belongs to reasonable men, while envy is base and belongs to the base, for the one makes himself get good things by jealousy, while the other does not allow his neighbour to have them through envy.

Democracy arises out of the notion that those who are equal in any respect are equal in all respects; because men are equally free, they claim to be absolutely equal.

For one swallow does not make a summer, nor does one day; and so too one day, or a short time, does not make a man blessed and happy.

Men create gods after their own image, not only with regard to their form but with regard to their mode of life.

The true and the approximately true are apprehended by the same faculty; it may also be noted that men have a sufficient natural instinct for what is true, and usually do arrive at the truth. Hence the man who makes a good guess at truth is likely to make a good guess at probabilities.

Men are swayed more by fear than by reverence.

The generality of men are naturally apt to be swayed by fear rather than reverence, and to refrain from evil rather because of the punishment that it brings than because of its own foulness.

Therefore, the good of man must be the end of the science of politics.

It is evident that the state is a creation of nature, and that man is by nature a political animal.

The ideal man is his own best friend and takes delight in privacy.

The life of children, as much as that of intemperate men, is wholly governed by their desires.

Quite often good things have hurtful consequences. There are instances of men who have been ruined by their money or killed by their courage.

The argument of Alcidamas: Everyone honours the wise. Thus the Parians have honoured Archilochus, in spite of his bitter tongue; the Chians Homer, though he was not their countryman; the Mytilenaeans Sappho, though she was a woman; the Lacedaemonians actually made Chilon a member of their senate, though they are the least literary of men; the inhabitants of Lampsacus gave public burial to Anaxagoras, though he was an alien, and honour him even to this day.

Men are divided between those who are as thrifty as if they would live forever, and those who are as extravagant as if they were going to die the next day.

The man who confers a favour would rather not be repaid in the same coin.

Men come together in cities in order to live: they remain together in order to live the good life

In a word, acts of any kind produce habits or characters of the same kind. Hence we ought to make sure that our acts are of a certain kind; for the resulting character varies as they vary. It makes no small difference, therefore, whether a man be trained in his youth up in this way or that, but a great difference, or rather all the difference.

Poetry demands a man with a special gift for it, or else one with a touch of madness in him.

Again, it is possible to fail in many ways (for evil belongs to the class of the unlimited and good to that of the limited), while to succeed is possible only in one way (for which reason also one is easy and the other difficult—to miss the mark easy, to hit it difficult); for these reasons also, then, excess and defect are characteristic of vice, and the mean of virtue; For men are good in but one way, but bad in many.

If we state the function of man to be a certain kind of life, and this to be an activity or actions of the soul implying a rational principle, and the function of a good man to be the good and noble performance of these, and if any action is well performed when it is performed in accordance with the appropriate excellence human good turns out to be activity of the soul in accordance with virtue, and if there are more than one virtue, in accordance with the best and most complete.

It is through wonder that men now begin and originally began to philosophize; wondering in the first place at obvious perplexities, and then by gradual progression raising questions about the greater matters too.

All men are alike when asleep.

All men agree that a just distribution must be according to merit in some sense; they do not all specify the same sort of merit, but democrats identify it with freemen, supporters of oligarchy with wealth (or noble birth), and supporters of aristocracy with excellence.

The young are heated by Nature as drunken men by wine.

The angry man wishes the object of his anger to suffer in return; hatred wishes its object not to exist.

If purpose, then, is inherent in art, so is it in Nature also. The best illustration is the case of a man being his own physician, for Nature is like that - agent and patient at once.

It is this simplicity that makes the uneducated more effective than the educated when addressing popular audiences-makes them, as the poets tell us, 'charm the crowd's ears more finely.' Educated men lay down broad general principles; uneducated men argue from common knowledge and draw obvious conclusions.

Nature of man is not what he was born as, but what he is born for.

Even the best of men in authority are liable to be corrupted by passion. We may conclude then that the law is reason without passion, and it is therefore preferable to any individual.

. . . the man is free, we say, who exists for his own sake and not for another's.

I say that habit's but a long practice, friend, and this becomes men's nature in the end.

All men desire by nature to know.

Evil draws men together.

Sophocles said he drew men as they ought to be, and Euripides as they were.

A democracy is a government in the hands of men of low birth, no property, and vulgar employments.

Evils draw men together.

The man who is content to live alone is either a beast or a god.

The family is the association established by nature for the supply of man's everyday wants.

There are some jobs in which it is impossible for a man to be virtuous.

The life of theoretical philosophy is the best and happiest a man can lead. Few men are capable of it and then only intermittently. For the rest there is a second-best way of life, that of moral virtue and practical wisdom.

If men are given food, but no chastisement nor any work, they become insolent.

Just as at the Olympic games it is not the handsomest or strongest men who are crowned with victory but the successful competitors, so in life it is those who act rightly who carry off all the prizes and rewards.

.. for desire is like a wild beast, and anger perverts rulers and the very best of men. Hence law is intelligence without appetition.

Perhaps here we have a clue to the reason why royal rule used to exist formerly, namely the difficulty of finding enough men of outstanding virtue ..

But it is not at all certain that this superiority of the many over the sound few is possible in the case of every people and every large number. There are some whom it would be impossible: otherwise the theory would apply to wild animals- and yet some men are hardly any better than wild animals.

A man who examines each subject from a philosophical standpoint cannot neglect them: he has to omit nothing, and state the truth about each topic.

The society that loses its grip on the past is in danger, for it produces men who know nothing but the present, and who are not aware that life had been, and could be, different from what it is.

The Life of the intellect is the best and pleasantest for man, because the intellect more than anything else is the man. Thus it will be the happiest life as well.

When their adventures do not succeed, however, they run away; but it was the mark of a brave man to face things that are, and seem, terrible for a man, because it is noble to do so and disgraceful not to do so.

Tragedy is an imitation not of men but of a life, an action

Plants, again, inasmuch as they are without locomotion, present no great variety in their heterogeneous pacts. For, when the functions are but few, few also are the organs required to effect them. ... Animals, however, that not only live but perceive, present a great multiformity of pacts, and this diversity is greater in some animals than in others, being most varied in those to whose share has fallen not mere life but life of high degree. Now such an animal is man.

Why is it that all men who are outstanding in philosophy, poetry or the arts are melancholic?

Being a father is the most rewarding thing a man whose career has plateaued can do.

Men in general desire the good and not merely what their fathers had.

It makes no difference whether a good man has defrauded a bad man, or a bad man defrauded a good man, or whether a good or bad man has committed adultery: the law can look only to the amount of damage done.

So virtue is a purposive disposition, lying in a mean that is relative to us and determined by a rational principle, and by that which a prudent man would use to determine it. It is a mean between two kinds of vice, one of excess and the other of deficiency...

... the good for man is an activity of the soul in accordance with virtue, or if there are more kinds of virtue than one, in accordance with the best and most perfect kind.

The Good of man is the active exercise of his soul's faculties in conformity with excellence or virtue, or if there be several human excellences or virtues, in conformity with the best and most perfect among them.

Life is full of chances and changes, and the most prosperous of men may in the evening of his days meet with great misfortunes.

The things best to know are first principles and causes, but these things are perhaps the most difficult for men to grasp, for they are farthest removed from the senses ...

Men regard it as their right to return evil for evil and, if they cannot, feel they have lost their liberty.

Men create the gods after their own images.

The same ideas, one must believe, recur in men's minds not once or twice but again and again.

The appropriate age for marrige is around eighteen and thirty-seven for man

Knowing what is right does not make a sagacious man.

Why do men seek honour? Surely in order to confirm the favorable opinion they have formed of themselves.

Men cling to life even at the cost of enduring great misfortune.

Whereas the law is passionless, passion must ever sway the heart of man.

To learn is a natural pleasure, not confined to philosophers, but common to all men.

He who is by nature not his own but another's man is by nature a slave.

The vigorous are no better than the lazy during one half of life, for all men are alike when asleep.

To die in order to avoid the pains of poverty, love, or anything that is disagreeable, is not the part of a brave man, but of a coward.

If then nature makes nothing without some end in view, nothing to no purpose, it must be that nature has made all of them for the sake of man.

There is a cropping-time in the races of men, as in the fruits of the field; and sometimes, if the stock be good, there springs up for a time a succession of splendid men; and then comes a period of barrenness.

All men naturally desire knowledge. An indication of this is our esteem for the senses; for apart from their use we esteem them for their own sake, and most of all the sense of sight. Not only with a view to action, but even when no action is contemplated, we prefer sight, generally speaking, to all the other senses. The reason of this is that of all the senses sight best helps us to know things, and reveals many distinctions.

The man who is truly good and wise will bear with dignity whatever fortune sends, and will always make the best of his circumstances.

To be angry is easy. But to be angry with the right man at the right time and in the right manner, that is not easy.

Yes the truth is that men's ambition and their desire to make money are among the most frequent causes of deliberate acts of injustice.

It is of the nature of desire not to be satisfied, and most men live only for the gratification of it.

Melancholy men, of all others, are the most witty.

Since the branch of philosophy on which we are at present engaged differs from the others in not being a subject of merely intellectual interest — I mean we are not concerned to know what goodness essentially is, but how we are to become good men, for this alone gives the study its practical value — we must apply our minds to the solution of the problems of conduct.

These virtues are formed in man by his doing the actions ... The good of man is a working of the soul in the way of excellence in a complete life.

Some men are just as sure of the truth of their opinions as are others of what they know.

He who cannot see the truth for himself, nor, hearing it from others, store it away in his mind, that man is utterly worthless.

Man by nature wants to know.

Education and morals make the good man, the good statesman, the good ruler.

The fool tells me his reason; the wise man persuades me with my own.

The difference between a learned man and an ignorant one is the same as that between a living man and a corpse.

A man is his own best friend; therefore he ought to love himself best.

...for all men do their acts with a view to achieving something which is, in their view, a good.